This is a brief posting on the above AIIM seminar held in the Metro Convention Centre downtown today, Toronto being the last city on the north-american 'tour' for this year.
The general opening session by Peggy from AIIM concentrated on definitions of ECM and BPM and questions about how many people in the room (which was pretty full) were already using, or planning on using Sharepoint, and what for. Oh yes, I should explain, Sharepoint and BPM were the twin themes of the day, the reason for this, as Peggy explained, is that while in real life Sharepoint might not do everything MS tells us, or as easily as they would have us beleive, it has changed the market place and it certainly is the 800lb guerilla in the ECM room.
We then had a guy from OpenText do a brief, and generic presentation on educating users, as OpenText were the 'education' sponsor of the event, and if you have ever read my blog before you will know I am big on the concept of educating users in information management (as opposed to 'training' them on a specific solution), and I am also a big fan of AIIM training courses.
The day then split into two tracks, so you had to make a decision on which session you were going to attend.
My first session was one by SpringCM (the SaaS CM provider) entitled: 'Extending Sharepoint beyond collaboration'. An interesting session contrasting what an in house Sharepoint installation might be good for, versus a SaaS offering like Spring. Also noted that the current sweet spot for SaaS is the Small to Medium Business space, and also more or less autonomous departments of larger enterprises. The speaker also had some intereting points on 'configuration versus customisation' (he is preaching to the converted with me.....) and on how with a SaaS offering like SpringCM if you want to add Records Management to your content management they just 'flick the switch' - Mmmm' I doubt its really that easy, retention policies anyone.... ? All in all an interesting session.
Next up was EMC with 'Got Sharepoint, get control!". Again, with this session EMC were pretty much preaching to the converted. You can sum up this session by a qoute from towards the end of it; "its not a competition, this is not about Documentum versus Sharpoint. If it was a competition then with millions of seats deployed, Sharepoint has already won".
While I question exactly how many of the millions of the MOSS licences are actually in use, we understand the point. So, its not a simple or direct competition, which allows EMC to say that Sharepoint is great for 'basic content services' and its a great User Experience (UI), but it does not do BPM (only document routing workflow), its not a sophisticated RM solution, it does not fit particularily well with birth to death content lifecycles and HSM / tiered storage. All what you would expect from EMC of course, and personally I agree with much of it, but you may not.
However they also got onto the Sharepoint governance track, and noted that Microsoft themselves apparently have over 100,000 Sharepoint sites - nightmare ! Finally for the content management geeks out there, they gave the 'storing data as BLOBS in SQL Server' architecture a good kicking - and this I completely agree with. All in all, another good session.
Next up was Clearview with 'Transcending Federated Search: unifying and managing multiple repositories such as Sharepoint with robust ECM services". Blimey, could they have come up with a longer title ?
A very entertaining speaker who dealt very well with his frozen Powerpoint slides that would not keep up with him. Nicely started with pointing out the differences between WSS and MOSS, and had a truly excellent set of one liners under the heading of "order from chaos". So in turn, this is his take on Microsofts progression;
1. we started with 'creative' use of file shares
2. we progressed to 'extended' use of Outlook (.pst as filing cabinet ?)
3. we are now in 'ill guided' proliferation of Sharepoint
I love that, I think its a great continuum. He went on to discuss the CMIS standard and 'virtual domains' i.e. federated managment of multiple repositories, and finished with a small amount of Clearview specific stuff.
Final session was Hyland Software "ECM vendors should practice what they preach". An excellent session which can be summed up easily in one sentence - "ECM is a strategy, not a single product". Some very cogent arguements against trying to do everything within a single 'suite' from a single vendor. I like that point that even if you have 40,000 seat deployment, in a 200,000 global enterprise, thats a 'point solution' - a nice observation. He also noted that due to growth by acquistion, even the really big vendors have product sets that are better at some things than others. In the Sharepoint context he was noting its strength in the 'basic content services' space; "most of us need something better than file shares and Outlook, we need ECM for the little guy".
Unfortunately due to returning to the office early for other committments I missed ABBYY's after lunch keynote on "Bridging the gap between ECM and BPM".
Overall a good and interesting seminar, with the vendors sticking true to AIIM's desire to present 25 mintues of generic content or case studies, but not product sales pitch. Although one person I spoke to found this a tad frustrating as he wanted to know more about each vendors capabilities, oh well, you can't have it both ways.
Another interesting thing was the amount of Records Managers who put up their hands (every time someone asked them to) - does this mean they were all looking for something other than Sharepoint for RM , well thats a bit of a leap on my par. Overall the message I got from the whole thing, but one that was not said in these exact words was: "Sharepoint, its a freakin portal, OK ?"
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Monday, 27 October 2008
What is an Intranet anyway ?
A question I ask (and intend to answer) in response to a posting by Shiv Singh on the AppGap blog entitled 'Intranets are not just intranets anymore'.
I am not going to regurgitate Shiv's posting, but I would suggest you go take a look at it. So what do you consider to be an 'intranet' ?
A good place to start is with the wikipedia definition:
"An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet protocols and network connectivity to securely share any part of an organization's information or operational systems with its employees. Sometimes the term refers only to the organization's internal website, but often it is a more extensive part of the organization's computer infrastructure and private websites are an important component and focal point of internal communication and collaboration." It is acually quite a long page, so you can read it all here.
Interestingly, my opinion on what an intranet is goes back to when I first started in IT, and I would have summarised it as "a private internet" too. Anything that uses internet protocols including HTTP, DNS etc
However it has become apparent to me that many people still consider the 'intranet' to be the "internal website". For some reason they do not consider all the other applications as being a part of the intranet, they just think of the 'corporate home' or news pages as provided by a commercial or home grown CMS. If we take the bigger picture as espoused by the Wikipedia definition though, it opens up the world to an 'intranet ecosystem' which may include your;
Where 'Cloud computing' fits i.e. integrating external, beyond the firewall applications into an existing intranet is another complex, but intrinsically linked question.
Shiv gets really interesting though, when he suggests the intranet might have grown beyond the browser. Using desktop widgets, built using the likes of Adobe AIR or MS Silverlight, we can have Rich 'Intranet' Applications (RIA) that don't need a browser. As noted in a comment on Shiv's posting, less than a year ago I had a serious conversation about using 'Outlook as a portal' - levering MS Outlook's messaging, task management and calendering, with add on's such as integrated RSS reader (now a standard feature of Outlook 2007), the Documentum Client for Outlook (many ECM suites provide an Outlook client) and integration with MS Live Communications server. In the end we did not progress this train of thought. Would it work? Maybe, in an organisation with an MS centric desktop infrastructure.
So what do you think ? You can check out many Intranet 2.0 themed postings by Toby Ward at www.intranetblog.com and even better, you can take part in Prescients Intranet 2.0 survey and help us build the body of research.
Also the slides for 'Intranet 2.0: the future of intranets' are available on Slideshare.net, this is a sneak preview of Toby's session at the Jboye08 conference in Denmark.
I am not going to regurgitate Shiv's posting, but I would suggest you go take a look at it. So what do you consider to be an 'intranet' ?
A good place to start is with the wikipedia definition:
"An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet protocols and network connectivity to securely share any part of an organization's information or operational systems with its employees. Sometimes the term refers only to the organization's internal website, but often it is a more extensive part of the organization's computer infrastructure and private websites are an important component and focal point of internal communication and collaboration." It is acually quite a long page, so you can read it all here.
Interestingly, my opinion on what an intranet is goes back to when I first started in IT, and I would have summarised it as "a private internet" too. Anything that uses internet protocols including HTTP, DNS etc
However it has become apparent to me that many people still consider the 'intranet' to be the "internal website". For some reason they do not consider all the other applications as being a part of the intranet, they just think of the 'corporate home' or news pages as provided by a commercial or home grown CMS. If we take the bigger picture as espoused by the Wikipedia definition though, it opens up the world to an 'intranet ecosystem' which may include your;
- Information published in the form of web pages via a CMS
- Browser based interfaces to document management systems, your CRM system, your ERP's systems enterprise applications,
- Browser based query and reporting interfaces to your data wharehouse, operational management systems, strategic planning systems, dashboards and scorecards et al
- Browser based access to workspaces, and various other 'collaboration' tools
Where 'Cloud computing' fits i.e. integrating external, beyond the firewall applications into an existing intranet is another complex, but intrinsically linked question.
Shiv gets really interesting though, when he suggests the intranet might have grown beyond the browser. Using desktop widgets, built using the likes of Adobe AIR or MS Silverlight, we can have Rich 'Intranet' Applications (RIA) that don't need a browser. As noted in a comment on Shiv's posting, less than a year ago I had a serious conversation about using 'Outlook as a portal' - levering MS Outlook's messaging, task management and calendering, with add on's such as integrated RSS reader (now a standard feature of Outlook 2007), the Documentum Client for Outlook (many ECM suites provide an Outlook client) and integration with MS Live Communications server. In the end we did not progress this train of thought. Would it work? Maybe, in an organisation with an MS centric desktop infrastructure.
So what do you think ? You can check out many Intranet 2.0 themed postings by Toby Ward at www.intranetblog.com and even better, you can take part in Prescients Intranet 2.0 survey and help us build the body of research.
Also the slides for 'Intranet 2.0: the future of intranets' are available on Slideshare.net, this is a sneak preview of Toby's session at the Jboye08 conference in Denmark.
Thursday, 23 October 2008
ECM Forum Toronto
Today I spent the day at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre at the EMC Forum. It was a good day, informative, and I finally got to meet and chat with Chuck Hollis after his keynote.
During said keynote, which had a loose theme of 'the future of information management' Chuck mentioned an Economist Intelligence Unit report, sponsored by EMC; "The future of enterprise information governance" which was released today. If you click this link it will take you straight into the report PDF. You can also click here for a video of Chuck discussing the importance of information governance.
I attended an overview session on content management and archiving technologies, to see some of the Documentum 6.5 goodies, including 'My Documentum' and 'CentreStage' - but of course it was an overview, so no great detail, and even worse from my point of view, no demo machines or consultants with laptops in the 'exhibition area' so I did not get to play with CentreStage.
Admittedly this week is the big ARMA show in the U.S. and most of the EMC presence was there.
The second session was a Records Management one, with a focus on the new federated RM capabilities. This was a very intersting session, with some well grounded admissions that federated RM will never produce a 'perfect' solution from many viewpoints, but that some retention management over legacy silo's has got to be better than none at all ! You can check out EMC's Records Manager and Retention Policy Services products here.
As the final CMA track session was about document capture (i.e. scanning) I decided to check out the 'Data Loss Prevention' session. This is about using RSA products to prevent accidental loss of information from within your organisation, its not an "anti-hacking" type of security product, but it was interesting to me, but for what you might consider an odd angle. Microsoft was mentioned as a case study, as they wanted to use the DLP technology to safeguard source code, and it was mentioned that it was used to scan 30,000 file shares and 120,000 Sharepoint sites ! Please note that is note 30K 'folders' but 30K 'shares' with goodness knows how many folders in them......
Even better (?) did you immediately notice that they have 3 times more Sharepoint sites than file shares. Now that is what I call 'unchecked proliferation' :-) I will have to look up how many staff MS have on average, just to see how many Sharepoint sites per worker (or vice versa) that works out to be.
While we are talking about Sharepoint, and in reference to my previous post, the forum was much less of an unadulterated MOSS 'love in' than the last EMC World I attended (last year). The message seems to be much more that of "Sharepoint as the portal on top of our 'real' ECM system". The reasons for this being that the 'real' ECMS is better at playing nicely with Heirarchical Storage Management (HSM), single instance storage, transactional processes, RM and compliance. Possibly the qoute of the day was: "well Sharepoint done will is OK, but Sharepoint done badly is an absolute nightmare..."
Oh yeah, we hear you..!
During said keynote, which had a loose theme of 'the future of information management' Chuck mentioned an Economist Intelligence Unit report, sponsored by EMC; "The future of enterprise information governance" which was released today. If you click this link it will take you straight into the report PDF. You can also click here for a video of Chuck discussing the importance of information governance.
I attended an overview session on content management and archiving technologies, to see some of the Documentum 6.5 goodies, including 'My Documentum' and 'CentreStage' - but of course it was an overview, so no great detail, and even worse from my point of view, no demo machines or consultants with laptops in the 'exhibition area' so I did not get to play with CentreStage.
Admittedly this week is the big ARMA show in the U.S. and most of the EMC presence was there.
The second session was a Records Management one, with a focus on the new federated RM capabilities. This was a very intersting session, with some well grounded admissions that federated RM will never produce a 'perfect' solution from many viewpoints, but that some retention management over legacy silo's has got to be better than none at all ! You can check out EMC's Records Manager and Retention Policy Services products here.
As the final CMA track session was about document capture (i.e. scanning) I decided to check out the 'Data Loss Prevention' session. This is about using RSA products to prevent accidental loss of information from within your organisation, its not an "anti-hacking" type of security product, but it was interesting to me, but for what you might consider an odd angle. Microsoft was mentioned as a case study, as they wanted to use the DLP technology to safeguard source code, and it was mentioned that it was used to scan 30,000 file shares and 120,000 Sharepoint sites ! Please note that is note 30K 'folders' but 30K 'shares' with goodness knows how many folders in them......
Even better (?) did you immediately notice that they have 3 times more Sharepoint sites than file shares. Now that is what I call 'unchecked proliferation' :-) I will have to look up how many staff MS have on average, just to see how many Sharepoint sites per worker (or vice versa) that works out to be.
While we are talking about Sharepoint, and in reference to my previous post, the forum was much less of an unadulterated MOSS 'love in' than the last EMC World I attended (last year). The message seems to be much more that of "Sharepoint as the portal on top of our 'real' ECM system". The reasons for this being that the 'real' ECMS is better at playing nicely with Heirarchical Storage Management (HSM), single instance storage, transactional processes, RM and compliance. Possibly the qoute of the day was: "well Sharepoint done will is OK, but Sharepoint done badly is an absolute nightmare..."
Oh yeah, we hear you..!
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
A true Information Management niche for MOSS ?
I read something (in paper form - remember paper? no links...) about using Sharepoint to remove user created Access databases from desktops and file shares, and it got me thinking.
This really could be one of MOSS' sweet spots (alongside departmental portal and workgroup DM), because as any Information Management professional will tell you, the good old' productivity war horse that is MS Office can cause all sorts of enterprise information management issues and problems. These include creating and running what turn into business critical 'applications' on MS Access, and running all your financials via an intricate system of linked MS Excel spreadsheets.
Now I am not bashing Access and Excel as tools, they are great for desktop analysis, rapid prototyping, all sorts of work, but they were never designed for putting very large data files onto file shares, and letting lots of users get used to them as their primary reporting or financial applications. I know that my last employer had nothing that could be called an 'ERP', no Oracle Financials or the such, and all sorts of financial information lived in Excel 'documents', and of course, one thing that all ECM / EDRM systems seem to struggle with is MS' embedded linking mechanisms (OK, in Documentum you can check out all of the linked sheets in one go, but come on....). This usually leads to comments like "well you could do it in the old 'fat client' but thats now deprecated in favour of the web client, erm' you could try enabling WebDav on your repository..."
As I am sure many other companies and organisations have done, when free, robust databases were delivered from the open source community, the chant went up "No to Access, use MySQL instead..." but lets be fair, the organisation had been running a 3 day 'end user development in Access' training course for years, so if you did not have a skilled MySQL geek (with PHP skills to build the web front end) in your department, that message was probably going to fall on deaf ears, at least for a while.
However from an enterprise IM viewpoint, I still think its better to move Access databases onto MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, whatever you happen to have, and to have 'proper' financial systems instead of massess of linked Excel sheets, but perhaps MOSS can come to the rescue?
So, how does MOSS assist in this area, being the 'server' element of the 'Office' suite which it might be suggest has caused the problem in the first place ? Well because like any good portal platform it offers tools to allow users to access and work with information from various sources, and in this case those tools come in the form of:
According to MS the; "Business Data Catalog bridges the gap between the portal site and your business applications and enables you to bring in key data from various business applications to Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists, Web Parts, search, user profiles, and custom applications."
While its never as easy as the marketing makes out, if you can transfer 'mission semi-critical' (have I just coined a new term?) stuff from Access into a 'real' RDBMS and provide a nice Sharepoint portal provisioned front end, then 'Yay' enterprise information management wins another small victory....
So MOSS as the departmental / workgroup 'work in progress' or light weight document management solution (Basic Content Services has been used to describe this) reducing file share proliferation, and now as a 'server based' alternative to Excel and Access proliferation - it still does not add up to "ECM" in my opinion, but it sure could be useful !
Mind you if you have all the other 'bits' (InfoPath, Office Communications Server etc) you could even use collaboration features (blogs, wikis, forums), presence and Instant Messaging integration, and interactive forms and maybe actually reduce email traffic! But some serious organisational change management required there me thinks........
This really could be one of MOSS' sweet spots (alongside departmental portal and workgroup DM), because as any Information Management professional will tell you, the good old' productivity war horse that is MS Office can cause all sorts of enterprise information management issues and problems. These include creating and running what turn into business critical 'applications' on MS Access, and running all your financials via an intricate system of linked MS Excel spreadsheets.
Now I am not bashing Access and Excel as tools, they are great for desktop analysis, rapid prototyping, all sorts of work, but they were never designed for putting very large data files onto file shares, and letting lots of users get used to them as their primary reporting or financial applications. I know that my last employer had nothing that could be called an 'ERP', no Oracle Financials or the such, and all sorts of financial information lived in Excel 'documents', and of course, one thing that all ECM / EDRM systems seem to struggle with is MS' embedded linking mechanisms (OK, in Documentum you can check out all of the linked sheets in one go, but come on....). This usually leads to comments like "well you could do it in the old 'fat client' but thats now deprecated in favour of the web client, erm' you could try enabling WebDav on your repository..."
As I am sure many other companies and organisations have done, when free, robust databases were delivered from the open source community, the chant went up "No to Access, use MySQL instead..." but lets be fair, the organisation had been running a 3 day 'end user development in Access' training course for years, so if you did not have a skilled MySQL geek (with PHP skills to build the web front end) in your department, that message was probably going to fall on deaf ears, at least for a while.
However from an enterprise IM viewpoint, I still think its better to move Access databases onto MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, whatever you happen to have, and to have 'proper' financial systems instead of massess of linked Excel sheets, but perhaps MOSS can come to the rescue?
So, how does MOSS assist in this area, being the 'server' element of the 'Office' suite which it might be suggest has caused the problem in the first place ? Well because like any good portal platform it offers tools to allow users to access and work with information from various sources, and in this case those tools come in the form of:
- Excel Services (overview from MSDN)
- Business Data Catalog (overview from MSDN)
According to MS the; "Business Data Catalog bridges the gap between the portal site and your business applications and enables you to bring in key data from various business applications to Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists, Web Parts, search, user profiles, and custom applications."
While its never as easy as the marketing makes out, if you can transfer 'mission semi-critical' (have I just coined a new term?) stuff from Access into a 'real' RDBMS and provide a nice Sharepoint portal provisioned front end, then 'Yay' enterprise information management wins another small victory....
So MOSS as the departmental / workgroup 'work in progress' or light weight document management solution (Basic Content Services has been used to describe this) reducing file share proliferation, and now as a 'server based' alternative to Excel and Access proliferation - it still does not add up to "ECM" in my opinion, but it sure could be useful !
Mind you if you have all the other 'bits' (InfoPath, Office Communications Server etc) you could even use collaboration features (blogs, wikis, forums), presence and Instant Messaging integration, and interactive forms and maybe actually reduce email traffic! But some serious organisational change management required there me thinks........
Monday, 20 October 2008
Sharepoint is popular - new evidence
OK, yes this is meant to be a bit 'tongue in cheek' but one of my Prescient colleagues is handing over responsibility for our news letters to someone else, so she ran up the stats on which of the articles on our site have been most popular; and low and behold first and third place go to MOSS articles, while 2nd is taken by one of Toby's articles on Web 2.0
So, how shocking, Intranet 2.0 / web 2.0 and Sharepoint are popular !
On thursday I am spending the day at an EMC Forum in Toronto. I have spoken at a couple of these events in the U.K. and look forward to being in the audience. I am sure I will be learning about the latest and greatest integrations between EMC's Documentum ECM system and MOSS (as all the big ECM vendors seem to have taken the 'if you can't beat it, join it' approach) but I am more looking forward to learning about CentreStage (and would love to see it pitched as a Sharepoint killer). Also Chuck Hollis who writes the superb 'A Journey in Social Media' blog on EMC's social media programme is the keynote speaker, so hopefully I will get at least a few seconds to chat to Chuck, mainly to say thanks for everything he puts out there for the rest of us via his blog.
So, how shocking, Intranet 2.0 / web 2.0 and Sharepoint are popular !
On thursday I am spending the day at an EMC Forum in Toronto. I have spoken at a couple of these events in the U.K. and look forward to being in the audience. I am sure I will be learning about the latest and greatest integrations between EMC's Documentum ECM system and MOSS (as all the big ECM vendors seem to have taken the 'if you can't beat it, join it' approach) but I am more looking forward to learning about CentreStage (and would love to see it pitched as a Sharepoint killer). Also Chuck Hollis who writes the superb 'A Journey in Social Media' blog on EMC's social media programme is the keynote speaker, so hopefully I will get at least a few seconds to chat to Chuck, mainly to say thanks for everything he puts out there for the rest of us via his blog.
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
Intranet 2.0 Global Study
If you have ten minutes to spare, please take Prescient Digital Media's survey on Intranet 2.0
If you complete the survey you will recieve a copy of the results, including what's good, what's bad and what is just downright ugly (que the spaghetti western music.....)
If you complete the survey you will recieve a copy of the results, including what's good, what's bad and what is just downright ugly (que the spaghetti western music.....)
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